by Aaron Lansky
Yiddish (the word means “Jewish”) first emerged in the tenth or eleventh century among Jews living along the banks of the Rhine River. The more distinct their communities became, the more their spoken language differentiated itself from that of their non-Jewish German-speaking neighbors. Not unlike Black English, it became the “in” language of a people on the outs, except that in the case of Yiddish, Jews brought with them a core culture rooted in Hebrew (the language of the Torah) and Aramaic (the language of the later sections of the Talmud). As a result, Yiddish, like other Jewish vernaculars—there were more than a dozen, including Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-Provençal—was written in the Hebrew alphabet and derived as much as 20 percent of its vocabulary from Hebrew and Aramaic. There were also words from Latin, French, and Italian, picked up in the course of earlier Jewish migrations. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Jews were expelled from many of the duchies and counties of western Europe, opportunity beckoned in the huge, undeveloped Polish empire. Many Jews emigrated eastward, just as they were to move westward to America centuries later. They carried Yiddish with them, picking up new influences from local Slavic languages, including Polish, Ukrainian, White Russian, and Slovak. The East European “New World” was so welcoming that, especially at first, the Jewish population there expanded exponentially, until it comprised 75 percent of the world’s Jewish population. These Yiddish-speaking settlers are the ancestors of most of today’s American Jews.
As Max Weinreich observed, “a language is a dialect with an army.” Of course, Yiddish never had a country of its own, let alone an army or navy, and this may be one reason people have sometimes wondered whether it’s a language at all. For most of its history, Yiddish existed primarily as a spoken language, with only limited literary expression. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, though, when Enlightenment ideas and economic modernization began to shake the foundations of the traditional Jewish world, Yiddish gave rise to a vibrant modern culture. By the early twentieth century there were Yiddish newspapers and magazines, films and plays, politics, art, music—and a free-wheeling literature that marked one of the most concentrated outpourings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history.
Today Yiddish language is taught at scores of major colleges and universities throughout North America; twenty-five years ago it was taught only at Brandeis, Columbia, and perhaps a handful of others. This dearth of instruction was indicative of long-standing prejudice in mainstream Jewish scholarship, where for the most part the Jewish vernacular was either denigrated or ignored. Yiddish-speakers themselves, including some of the most prominent Yiddish writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, routinely referred to their language as Zhargon—Jargon. It was a bastard tongue, bad German, a linguistic mishmash, hardly a language at all. Jews intent on assimilation found it particularly odious. In Germany, for example, Jews tried to reduce Jewishness to a Konfession, a religion divorced from culture, insisting that they weren’t Jews at all, but rather “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.” Go make the case in Yiddish, where every word, every linguistic tic, is a reminder of peoplehood. Consider, for example, Max Weinreich’s example of a more or less random Yiddish sentence: Di bobe est tsholent af Shabes —The grandmother eats warmed-over bean stew on the Sabbath. Bobe, “grandmother,” is a Slavic word that entered Yiddish in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Est was adopted a thousand years ago, from Middle High German. Tsholent, bean stew, came from Old French more than a thousand years ago, probably from chaud, “hot,” and lent, “slow”—a fitting name for a dish that Jews keep warm on the Sabbath, when cooking is not allowed. And Shabes, “Sabbath,” is a Hebrew word that dates back several thousand years. Quite literally, Yiddish is a living chronicle of Jews’ historical experience, proof of their peoplehood, and it therefore spills the beans on assimilationist aspirations. No wonder bourgeois Jews hated it; no wonder scholars ignored it. In 1873, for example, the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz afforded Yiddish just two paragraphs in his magisterial six-volume History of the Jews. Never mind that Yiddish was then the first or only language of 80 percent of the world’s Jews; for Graetz, it was “eine halbtierische Sprache,” a half-bestial tongue.
However, half bestial or not, Yiddish was a language I needed to know, and since no courses were offered, I set off in the spring of 1974 in search of a teacher. Hampshire College is part of a five-college consortium with Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts. I went from school to school until I finally came to Jules Piccus, a professor of medieval Spanish literature at the University of Massachusetts. A man in his early sixties with a head of snow-white hair and a full white beard, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Karl Marx—and in certain circles was almost as famous. Posted on his office wall was the front page of a 1960s Spanish newspaper with the headline piccus is in madrid!—an alarm precipitated by his having discovered and removed long-forgotten, misplaced manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci from the Spanish National Library. Jules was not only a bibliographic sleuth but an accomplished scholar and a genuine polyglot, familiar with twenty languages. But his first love remained Yiddish, which he had spoken growing up in Brooklyn. He told me that he had taught the language from time to time in the past, and he planned to teach it again the following semester. In September of 1974 I joined twenty other students for the first day of Elementary Yiddish 110.
Our text, College Yiddish, was a systematic introduction to Yiddish grammar written by Max Weinreich’s son Uriel, a leading light in general linguistics until his untimely death in 1967. Jules was a demanding teacher. He gave lengthy homework assignments and was not much interested in excuses when students came to class unprepared. Most of the students, for their part, were dismayed at their teacher’s zeal: They had signed up for Yiddish because it sounded easy, and they were shocked to discover that it was as much a language as any other, with its own vocabulary, phonology, and rules of grammar.
“Just because your grandmothers spoke Yiddish, don’t think you’re going to learn the goddamned language through osmosis!” Jules warned on the first day of class. But few took his admonitions seriously, fewer still did the homework, and at the end of the first semester I was one of just two students who passed.
Clearly exasperated, Jules decided to call it quits. “If you kids don’t want to learn, then the hell with it!” he announced while handing back the final exams. Except that the two students still standing, Jack Jacobson and I, were not ready to give up so soon. Together with Roger Mummert and Kathy Singer, two friends from Hampshire College who had been studying Yiddish on their own, we went to see Jules in his office during the January intersession to ask if he’d continue to teach us privately. Jules agreed, under three conditions: We had to promise to “work like hell,” to come to class prepared, and, since Jules would be teaching us on his own time at the end of the regular school day, to bring with us a suitable snack to tide us all over until dinner. We soon settled upon a regular menu: Roger provided a warm loaf of homemade whole wheat bread that he baked the morning of each class, and the rest of us took turns providing cheese, butter, occasional homemade cake or cookies, and, always, a bottle of red wine.
And so we began. Every Wednesday at 5 P.M., when the academic buildings at UMass emptied out, we would file into Jules’s cramped office, slice the bread, uncork the wine, and set to work. Jules was an old-fashioned teacher: There were no games, no overhead projectors, no language labs. He believed that the only way to learn a language such as Yiddish, in which immersion was no longer practical, was by reading. We spent four weeks racing through the remaining chapters of College Yiddish—twice as much as we had covered during the whole previous semester. Fortunately, the task was not as difficult as it sounds, since Yiddish possesses only three tenses, three cases, and a fluid syntax that allows for remarkable subtlety of expression. Better yet, because it is, like English, a Germanic language, much of its vocabulary i
s sufficiently cognate to provide ready mnemonics. (For example, unter is “under,” bukh is “book,” vaser is “water,” and so forth.) What was difficult to learn was the cultural context, the specifically Jewish concepts that infuse so much of the language—and make it so worth learning in the first place.
After completing Weinreich, Jules decided to jump right into a full-length novel. We protested that we didn’t know enough yet, but he was insistent: “Do you want to spend your lives reading textbooks or do you want to read Yiddish?” He selected “the hardest goddamned book I could find”: Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The 1935 novel was written in a somewhat arcane Yiddish, intended to evoke the language of the seventeenth century, the period in which the story took place—even though its deeper meaning, the repudiation of redemptive ideology, could not have been more current. For the next year and a half we lived and breathed Bashevis Singer’s story about the aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres and the failure of false messiahs in the shtetl of Goray, “the little town at the end of the world.” We worked khevruse style, meeting together during the week to prepare an assigned portion of text. At the beginning we had to look up every word in the dictionary, which was no small trick since modern Yiddish literature had emerged so recently—and its writers and publishers were so famously contentious—that standardized orthography was still not universally accepted, and we had to figure out for ourselves the spelling variant under which a given word could be found in the dictionary. Moreover, the newest dictionary at our disposal, the 1968 Modern English–Yiddish Yiddish–English Dictionary by Uriel Weinreich, included only words that Weinreich believed were appropriate for modern Yiddish; words that he felt were archaic, daytshmerish (excessively derivative from modern German), colloquial, vulgar, or otherwise inappropriate were left out—thus eliminating a significant percentage of Singer’s lexicon.
When we couldn’t find a word in Weinreich, we turned to Alexander Harkavy’s Jewish–English English–Jewish Dictionary, a work first compiled in 1898. Here the problem was not so much Harkavy’s Yiddish as his English. An immigrant from Russia, Harkavy had been somewhat overzealous in his embrace of the Queen’s English, and not infrequently his English definitions sent us scurrying to an English dictionary to understand what he was trying to say. Here, for example, is a string of purportedly English words that appear under the letter “M” in the “English–Jewish” side of the dictionary: moxa, muchwat, mucid, mucidness, mucilage, mucilaginous, muciperous, mucours, mucus, mucusness. . . . And so forth. This was one Jewish immigrant who could give the OED a run for its money.
We persevered. On Wednesday morning we’d get together to review the week’s text while Roger kneaded dough and kept an eye on the oven. Late in the afternoon we’d take a bus to the university, open our books, and begin.
“Nu, Yankl, leyen a bisl! (Nu, Jack, read a little!)” Jules began each class, addressing Jack Jacobson, who invariably sat to the teacher’s right. We enjoyed this opening line so much that it became Jack’s nickname. Even outside of class, we took to calling him Yankl Leyenabisl.
We proceeded word by word, sentence by sentence, taking turns reading out loud and translating as we went. At Jules’s suggestion, we’d underline a word in the dictionary each time we looked it up, and it was seldom that we had to look up a word more than twice. It was an old-fashioned method, but it worked. After two years of kneading dough, sipping wine, and flipping through dictionaries, we not only finished Sotn in Goray but were able to make our way, slowly but surely, through almost any Yiddish text we could find.
If only we could find them.
AMONG THE FIVE colleges in and around Amherst, Massachusetts, only the library at the University of Massachusetts possessed any Yiddish books at all, and its holdings were eclectic at best. By the mid-1970s virtually the whole of Yiddish literature was out of print. The Complete Works of Sholem Aleichem, for example, the most popular and arguably the greatest work of Yiddish literature, was last published in the United States in 1928; The Complete Works of I. L. Peretz, consisting of plays, poems, essays, and stories by one of the most profound Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, last appeared in 1948. My fellow students and I tried ordering used books by mail from an old Yiddish publisher and book distributor in New York, but its selection was small, its business practices arcane, and more often than not the books never arrived. Occasionally we’d see a Yiddish title listed at an exorbitant price in the catalog of a rare book dealer in Amsterdam; otherwise we had no idea where else to turn.
I tried. I scoured the used book stores of Cambridge; I got up at dawn to be first in line at the annual League of Women Voters’ book sale under a tent on the Amherst Common. But to no avail. Finally it was Jules Piccus who suggested a solution. “Don’t think the books are going to come to you,” he said. “If you want Yiddish books you’ve got to go to them. Drive down to New York, to the Lower East Side. That’s where Yiddish-readers used to live, that’s where you’ll find Yiddish books!” He paused for a moment, then, smiling through his white beard, he added, “And while you’re there you can stop at Guss’s Pickles on Hester Street and bring me back a gallon of half-sours.”
3. “Come Back after Yontef!”
Dishes were clanging, trays banging, old people pushing, and just about everyone was yelling at once, the servers in Spanish and the customers in Yiddish. Roger, Kathy, and I had been studying Yiddish with Professor Piccus for almost a year now, and this, in the late spring of 1975, was the latest step in our determined but until now fruitless search for Yiddish books. Together with my friends Paul Novak and Laurie Radovsky, we had borrowed a van from Hampshire College and arrived in New York at about eleven o’clock on a beautiful April morning. I had been to New York just once before, to visit the World’s Fair in 1964, and never to the Lower East Side. Stepping out of the van I was amazed at how Jewish it still seemed. Guss’s was just one of several pickle emporia where workers in dirty aprons and rolled-up sleeves plunged their bare hands into big barrels of brine, coming up with half- and full-sour pickles, bright red peppers, fistfuls of sauerkraut, and heads of pickled cauliflower. Open barrels covered the sidewalk for half a block, and the entire street reeked of garlic, dill, and vinegar. Several blocks away the air turned heavy and sweet as we passed Shapiro’s House of Kosher Wines, whose startling logo featured a knife standing upright in a glass of wine, topped by the dubious claim “The Wine So Thick You Can Almost Cut It with a Knife!” On still other streets we passed fading, peeling signs in Hebrew and Yiddish, advertising tiny basement stores where dusty old men sold taleysim, mezuzahs, and other religious articles. In some storefronts one could watch soyfrim at work: ancient scribes with long gray beards who used quill pens to hand letter the parchment scrolls of the Torah. On every block were synagogues and the one-room Hasidic prayer houses known as shtiblekh. At the end of East Broadway, towering above the entire neighborhood, was the headquarters of the Jewish Daily Forward, the socialist Yiddish newspaper that had dominated immigrant Jewish life in America for more than eighty years. And right next to the ten-story Forward building was the Garden Cafeteria, a culinary landmark where Yiddish writers, intellectuals, shopkeepers, and workers had been coming for years to farbrengen —to eat, talk, and argue. It was almost noontime, and we could see through the steamy windows that the place was full. Figuring that someone among all those elderly Jews would know where we could find Yiddish books, we opened the door and stepped inside.
“Tickets!” the cashier yelled as we entered, forcing little printed cards into our hands. The system, it appeared, was that every time you ordered a dish, you presented the card to the server, who punched a hole in a box for the appropriate amount. You kept amassing holes until, after a full afternoon of shmoozing and eating, you were finally ready to settle accounts on your way out the door.
We, for our part, were having trouble just getting in the door. While the cashier impatiently explained the system, other patrons were already
pushing from behind. By the time we made it to the cafeteria line, we were being jostled from all sides at once:
“Hurry up! What’s the matter mit you?”
“Can’t you see you got hungry people here?”
“Nu already, for what are you dillydallying?”
The Spanish-speaking servers were holding their own in the multi-lingual shouting match. A bit unnerved, we ordered as best we could, piling our trays high with blintzes and sour cream, kasha varnishkes and mushroom gravy, varenikes with fried onions, matzo brei and several other milkhig (dairy) specials. Then we tried to find a table. It goes without saying that none of the five of us looked like your typical Garden Cafeteria customer: We were fifty years too young, we spoke English, and every one of us sported long hair and jeans. But no one seemed to notice. In fact, as we squeezed ourselves into five empty seats at one of the cafeteria’s long communal tables, the people already sitting there didn’t even look up: They were far too busy arguing, engaged in a passionate discussion of some heated subject beyond our linguistic reach, which is to say that they were all speaking in Yiddish and all speaking at once. Hands were waving, fingers pointing, sentences punctuated with heaping spoonfuls of sour cream. It was only when one particularly vociferous old man banged his cup on his tray in a dramatic bid for attention and sent hot coffee splashing in every direction that someone finally noticed the five young newcomers in their midst. The argument came to a sudden halt.
“Um, sholem aleykhem,” I said in tentative greeting, taking advantage of the silence to address the whole table at once. These were the first Yiddish words I had ever spoken outside of a university setting, and I could feel myself blushing.
“Aleykhem sholem,” answered the woman closest to me, putting on her eyeglasses and looking me over from head to toe. Apart from the Hispanic servers and busboys, we appeared to be the only people in the restaurant under seventy-five.
